Instead of just making flyers with mere portraits of your products, what you need now in the modern markets are flashy and vibrant designs that catch the eyes of readers. In fact, since most are more into digital media consumption these days, you will need to match the detail, and special effects of those specialized works, to make a convincing and compelling type of advertising flyer for your products.

In this easy tutorial, we will teach you how you can create your own flashy product advertising flyer design using Adobe Photoshop. This should give you some initial tips and tricks to get you started on more modern looking and effective full color flyers.

1. We first start with the document setup. Create a new document once Adobe Photoshop opens by pressing CTRL+N. Set the width and height to your flyer’s dimensions. In this example we are going to use an 8.5x5.5 inch flyer dimension at 300ppi resolution. Switch the color mode to CMYK color, especially if you plan to have your design printed with a four color printer.

2. Great, now to be safe with our printing, we place in some margins. Bring up the rulers if they are not visible by pressing CTRL+R. Click from the rulers to the canvass to drag a light blue guideline into your document. Calculate around a quarter of an inch margin for all the sides of our document.

3. Great! Now as a base for our background we use the gradient tool to add a black and dark grey color gradient to our initial background layer.

4. Next, we will be processing our image feature for the flyer. In this case it is an image of a fancy tablet gadget. We got this from morguefile.com. Now, you can process the image either as its own document or within the flyer design document as you see fit. To make things easier though, we process it in its own document. Using the magic wand tool or the magnetic lasso tool, we select its shape/form and copy the device so that we can paste it without the background to our design.

5. Now, we just paste in the gadget to the layout. Make sure to scale it properly by pressing CTRL+T and then resizing the image whilst holding the SHIFT key. Place it at the center of our design.

6. Next, using the pen tool create some nice curved lines across the product. Make sure you click and drag the anchor points of the pen tool so that you get some nice curves.

7. Now, create a new layer by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N. Next, click on the brush tool. Set it to round 5px brush with a white color. This will be a preparatory step. Also make sure that the hardness of the brush is set to 100%.

8. Next, bring up the pen tool again by pressing P. Right click on the path we just selected and click on the option “stroke path…”. In the small window that opens, select brush and click on the option to simulate stroke pressure. Click on OK afterwards.

9. Great! Now you have a nice light streak across our device. Now, there are several ways to do this mind you. The easiest for newcomers to go for would be to use layer styles. Just double click on the streaks layer, then on the window that opens, click on the option “color overlay”. Change the color to the color that you want by just clicking the color box.

10. Now, to add a fiery streak appearance, we also click on the “Outer Glow” option in the layer styles. We choose a bright red color for the glow, with a size of 5px. Press ok once you are done, and you have a nice fiery streak.

11. Great! Now, duplicate this fiery streak by pressing CTRL+J with the layer selected. Then hide the original streak first as a backup just in case you make a mistake. Select our duplicate streak and go to Filters -> Blur -> Motion Blur. Set the distance to 10 pixels. Also, adjust the angle by clicking on the round angle icon. Change the value until you get a nice blurred effect in some parts of your streak, whilst it is still solid on the others. This all depends on now you composed your steak of course. For our example we used a -7 angle.

12. Once you are satisfied with your blurs, duplicate the blurred streak 2 more times to get a total of 3 blurred streaks. Nudge the copies several pixels downwards by using the arrow keys, with one being further from the original than the other. You should get a nice parallel streak effect. Group this together in a layer group to make them easier to control. Just click on the create layer group icon below the layers panel and drag the streak layers there.

13. Great, now we will erase some of the streak lines to simulate that they go behind our product device. To do this hold down the CTRL key and click on the layer thumbnail image of our device. This will select the area of the device. Now go through each of the streak lines and erase the areas that are supposed to go behind the device. Of course, to make things look convincing, make sure to also leave some streaks overlapping the image.

14. Great! Now, remember the original streak that we used as a backup earlier? Make that visible once again. Press CTRL+T and then right click on it to bring up the transform context menu. Select “warp” and warp the original streak to add another streak area to our design.

15. Then, just use the same process of duplication, motion blur and erasing to recreate our original streaks set but in a different position and orientation.

16. Now, create a new layer just below the device image layer by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N. Fill this layer with black by using the paint bucket tool. Then, go to Filter -> Render Lighting Effects… Set the style to RGB lights. Change the position of the lights using the preview box, position them to add a spotlight to our device. Change the exposure to over 100.

17. Then, change the blend mode of this layer to Screen and reduce its opacity by 50%.

18. Next, create another new layer. We will be adding some twinkles near our streaks. Use the brush tool here with a light orange or light yellow color. Right click on the canvass and choose “Starburst” brush which should be available as a standard brush in Photoshop CS4. Use this brush to paint twinkles in your design. If you want you can also vary the size and color of these twinkles.

19. Then, we shall add some extra emphasis lines just under the device again. Create a highlight rectangle by using the rectangle tool to go from top to bottom of our design. Then, use the eraser tool to erase one side of it. Use a round soft brush to do this.

20. Then, reduce its opacity to 20%. Duplicate this layer 2-8 times by pressing CTRL+J. This all depends on how many of these shapes that you want.

21. Then, change the position of those duplicates to add a creative highlight effect for the central product.

22. Finally, we just add in some text for the flyer. Make sure you use sans serif fonts for the best result. Here we are using Impact as the font style.

23. Now, using the same process with the light streaks, we add a red stroke layer style to make it a bit more fiery. We duplicate the text. Then, we also add the same Motion Blur settings for the duplicate text to make it look fuzzy. We then reduce the opacity so that the original text still stands out. You should be able to get this interesting effect.

FINAL IMAGE

That should finish your sleek, modern and stylish looking product advertising flyer. Hope you have learned a lot from our tutorial. Good Luck!

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